Barnsdale House - natatorium - 2:35 a.m. - Allen Dale hated the water, really. Always had. Hadn't even learnt to swim until their Royal Army training required it. After all, hadn't an uncle of his died of drowning? Well, yes, not in water, of course. But still. Water and he, not on the best of terms, even here, among these islands where he was perpetually surrounded by it, forced to journey over and on it innumerable times. Several times each day.

Just, really, not his thing.

Robin had taken off for wherever secret location Marion broadcast the Nightwatch, leaving Allen with an order to stay put at the house. Nice house, interesting house - plenty of places to hide oneself, occupy oneself in the snooping about of.

He didnt really mind staying put, for all that his curiosity about the Nightwatch would have enjoyed sitting in on a broadcast. Well, whatever Lady Marion and Robin were about to get up to - scrapping or spooning - he probably would have less liked to be sitting in on.

He had no good excuse to be about Barnsdale at all, but he reckoned with Marion's return he could garner some plausible invitation. Certainly the food (even the leftovers) here were top-shelf. And the guards occupying the chauffeur's quarters were free enough with their Reichmarks when it came to games of chance.

He had not been to the swimming pool before, though. He had found his way here tonight while wandering around to pass the time. He kept himself a good distance from it, closer to the lounge furniture than the tiled edge. The lighting was not engaged (he did not, actually, see how to turn it on), and only the moonlight through the high and broad windows cast any illumination across the water and the upon the decorative plants and statuary.

It had particularly struck upon a marble female nude, shadowing parts of her exquisite torso like as would clothing of some kind had she been sculpted wearing any.

Which she had not.

The figurine of her showed her as though stepping into the pool from its edge, one hand gone down to cup the water and lift it up to her extended foot. Which meant she was bent over at a...very admirable angle. Her face was turned, her chin tilted as though she had been caught in her bathe mid-act by someone approaching.

And though she was not nearly a life-size depiction, he found, quite surprisingly, that he could have sat and admired her visible 'charms' for some while.

He marveled that this place was simply full of beautiful women. Perhaps it was something in the water, after all. Marion, to be sure. Good looking, but a right pill when she chose to be. Eva Heindl - a beauty he knew in more ways than most. Why, if the gang knew a third of the situations he had had to continue driving through, her in the back of the car with the Kommandant - why they'd none of them sleep at all of a night. Not without a good wank to blow off steam first.

Actually, he didn't know why, but he had always sort of protected Eva from the gang, left her out of the stories he tended to tell. He'd shared one-on-one with Robin specifics (not of a particularly salacious nature) about her relationship with Vaiser, thinking of it as 'need-to-know', but none of the rest of the gang had ever seen her, save over very long distances (if that), and did not even know her name. He wondered if they any one of them could have picked her out of a line-up of similarly figured girls. (Not that with a figure like hers there would be many like it to assemble.)

Maybe it was the times the Kommandant had directed him to drop her off at her family's house - barely a cottage, really - after a long party. The Kommandant having disembarked, leaving Allen alone to the task, Eva sometimes nearly dropping to sleep in the backseat as he drove the rutted lanes and rarely-used tracks back to her home.

Though he had never been invited in, he had seen the family at work, and at play there. Six in all. An infirm mother, an older teenage brother, too young to be the man the family was in need of. Two younger sisters and a small boy, about four. Allen found he understood Eva Heindl, though they two had never discussed it (nor likely ever would). She did what she did to survive. And so that they might survive. Something told him her life with the Kommandant was not something she hid from them, either - nor wore as a badge of honor (as some Islander girls did where their Jerry lovers were concerned). She would treat it merely as a fact of life.

It was a kind of life to which in his past (his many pasts) he was far from a stranger.

The women he knew to have pursued it, though, had mostly lost what beauty they could have laid claim to years ago. Not so Eva.

Beauty, he thought, and got himself hit right between the eyes by the memory of Anya Grigorovna. There was something that had struck him from the moment he first met her. Someone looking as she did: neat, attractive, unerringly feminine - housed there among that place. Like a carpet of violets sprung up about the cast-off pile outside a glue factory: unexpected. There was something both delicate and simultaneously tenacious about her. At least he thought there was. He found himself faltering in his thoughts of her. Knowing now, at Carter's word, what her life within Treeton was like he could no longer let himself believe that he knew her. Their ever-brief conversations so far from true intimacy among friends. She had given him no confidences to keep. He had tried his best to rein in his natural tendency toward flirtatious behavior with her, to prevent himself from seeming to offer things to a woman unable to return such advances lightly.

But he had slipped back into old, tried and true habits in the end, on behalf of Mitch. Not knowing what her agreeing to stay on for him might cost her. That hurt.

To think that he had exploited her - asked someone already victimized to further submit to victimization - he would have bloody well punched himself had Carter not. He was an information man, after all. How could he not have seen? Not suspected?

His face, no need for him to cloak it alone in the dark, showed the disgust and angst that he felt about the situation. One of his fists had actually gone to grip a shock of his own hair and give it a tug of frustration.

He did not hear the padding of bare feet on the tile floor, but when the special nighttime lighting was engaged, his head snapped up in response to it, before he could wipe his anxious, self-loathing expression.

"Mr. Allen?" Eleri Vaiser asked, her own face a shock at seeing the dismay scored across his.

"Wot you doin' here?" he asked, half-barking out the question before she could think to ask him the same. In an eye's twinkling he had wiped his face clean of anything representing his inner thoughts. His demeanor, however, still gravitated toward brusque.

"I have, that is...Lady Marion told me...that I might swim." She indicated her present attire. She was indeed outfitted for a swim. The suit was obviously another loaner from Marion's closet, the hips and bust not filled quite as they ought to be on the nineteen-year-old's shape. Over her arm she had a towel draped, and a swim cap covering her hair. The cap and suit were of palest pink, the color barely discernable in the low mood lighting.

"And I'm sure you well may," he told her.

She moved to place the towel on a chaise. "Is it always so like this among the English?" she asked him. "So many people about so late at night?"

"Howzat?" he asked, for the first time feeling a bit of alarm at her inquisitiveness.

"Well, only that I wish to fit in. IF I am to be forced to stay here," she cast him a level glance, clearly thinking back to his refusal to smuggle her somehow to mainland France.

"Well, yes," he told her, "I dunno. Occupation's got us all a little out of sorts I reckon. Last couplea days hardly standard." His tone held none of its usual camaraderie.

"Have you been swimming?" she asked, though his attire should have clued her in otherwise.

"No," he told her, himself surprised by what came next out of his lips. "I have been thinking about how I have disappointed someone. Someone that I care about. That I would rather wish not to disappoint."

She stood still, considering this. "And so you have disappointed yourself?"

"Yeah," he agreed. "That's it."

"Herr Geis has disappointed Lady Marion," she told him, looking at him intently to gauge his response to the news.

He held back a scoff. "And was that hard to do?"

Her brow creased. "I do not know. They have had an awful quarrel, so the newest parlor maid says the stable boy told her. Lady Marion told him she was glad to have lost his ring. And she does not seem to wish for another one to replace it."

Allen re-cast his coming-on grin at this juicy gossip as troubled concern. "Ellie," he told her, instructively. "I think that may be best for all concerned."

"Best?" she almost cried out in disagreement, almost stamped her foot at his (to her) incorrect judgment of the situation. "A man like Herr Geis having his heart broken? You did not see him this evening afterward or you would not say so. He is tortured!" She did not shout, but was no less impassioned. "He has been scorned. I would not wish such unhappiness on anyone."

"Really," he replied, ambiguous in his delivery of the word. Still, he retained his seat, despite that knowing in her presence (as Kommandant's driver) he ought to stand.

"You do not like him much, I see. But you are wrong," Eleri told him. "He has qualities, Mr. Allen. Can't you see that he loves her?"

Allen felt his inner frustrations begin to push their way to the surface, as they might for some men at the pub who've had too much and find their anger spilling over into a physical brawl. "Don't be daft, Fraulein," he half-spit at her. "He doesn't even know her! If he loves someone, he loves someone who doesn't exist." And of course he knew more than a little about that. The Nightwatch: a clever paste-up concoction of Lady Marion, not a girl he could ever truly meet. Anya: a spectre of what she had really been made to become, him ignorant of her hurtful truth.

At his harsh retort, Eleri's face looked as though he had slapped her, and he recalled to himself that life among the nuns and the other girls at Ripley Convent School most likely did not involve strange men taking apart your notion of true love at two in the morning. "Chin up," he tried to lessen his attack on her. "If she really has thrown him over, you may have a chance with him after all."

He wondered if the Nightwatch ever took requests. He knew exactly what he would set aside for Miss Vaiser. "I fall in love too easily/I fall in love too fast/I fall in love too terribly hard/For love to ever last."

"How shortly ago," he reminded her, "you were begging me to snatch you away to your Yanick. Your 'meant-to-be' freedom fighter...how soon after arriving were you forcibly snogging me? And here you are, pining over your father's right-hand man?" He scoffed at her, telling himself he did not care if there was hurt bubbling up in her eyes. "You. Have exhausted me," he said. "I'm turning in."

He stood to go, realizing in that moment of facing the high glass windows that did she stay to swim there was a distinct possibility this might prove just the way Marion stole home of an early morning after her broadcast concluded. With Robin. And he certainly could not have anyone sussing out that.

Allen looked at her, expecting Eleri to attempt to make a peace with him, possibly get him to stay. Instead she simply looked like a cross between petulant and wounded.

She stared at him, her eyes flaring as if to ask, "why are you still here, then?"

So it was to be soley up to him to find some reason to lengthen their time together. He noticed something tucked into the towel she had laid down.

"Wot's this," he asked, seizing it before she could stop him.

"Nothing," she nearly snapped at him. But it was obvious she wished to tell someone, and him one of the only people on the islands she knew. "It is an invitation." Begrudgingly she added, "just as you said would come. To Cabaret Alstroemeria, to see Joss Tyr's show...and dine with Herr Prinzer."

He looked up through his eyebrows from the fancy invitation card. "Then why do you not look happier about it?" he asked. "His is a rather elite guest list."

Her eyes cast down at this. "I do not know how to dance. That is, not in the popular style. And I am sure there will be dancing."

"Can you waltz?" he asked. "All good Germans can, I am told."

"Yes," she told him, and he took her into a hold.

"Now relax it," he told her, "and step in closer." As she did so, the unfitted top of her borrowed swimsuit gaped somewhat, without her knowing it, and looking down from his height he had a nearly unobstructed view of the tempting swells of Miss Vaiser's still coming-on 'charms'.

His immediate reaction was to raise his chin, and close up the hold as much as he could without seeming ridiculous. Certainly this was the last sort of distraction he needed. He made an effort not to roll his eyes at the foolhardiness of his own actions. What he did for King and Country...for Robin. They would never appreciate it. He tried to come up with the least romantic song he could think of, but he just kept seeing her silly swim cap, droopy rubber faux-flowers sprouting all over it.

"Okay, then," he announced. "Off with that - or I shall have to expend all my energy to keep from giggling at you."

He had assumed her hair was pinned up under the cap. He was wrong. With the cap's removal her dark hair cascaded over her shoulders, down her bared back and over his own arm where he had her in the hold. Before he let himself think too much about the dangerous turn that had given the moment, he launched into a song, showing her how to move to the steps by following his own. "Pardon me, boy," he sang lightly, "Is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?/Track twenty-nine/Boy, you can gimme a shine."

"You've stepped on my foot," she protested. Hers was, after all, bare.

"No," Allen disputed her, "you misplaced your foot beneath mine. Give it another go, now..."

His mind was turning on so many axes now: Letting down Anya, safeguarding Marion's Nightwatch return, Wills' windmill proposal, another trip to come across the waters back to Sark, Geis given his walking papers, gaping swimsuit, length of hair tickling at his hand, fetching nude marble. He did not doubt he may have stepped wrongly. "You...leave the Pennsylvania Station 'bout a quarter to four/Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore/Dinner in the diner/Nothing could be finer/Than to have your ham an' eggs in Carolina..."

"What a queer song," she announced. "I don't understand half the words. What is it about?"

"Hmm..." Allen considered, "'S 'bout a chappy learnin' to accept his blunders, pull through them in the end," he lied. "Now just here, Hen," he fell back on being the instructor, "let us attempt a bit of a dip..."

Eyes up, Mate, he coached himself to look away from that still prone-to-gaping top. Lessens the distractions.

Not that Allen Dale could say, all in all, he minded a healthy diversion every now and then. Did keep one from growing too gloomy sullen, after all.

...TBC...

Author's Squee: Did you see - at the Royal Wedding today? The first airplane flyover (while they were waving from the balcony) was made up of three period RAF planes from The Battle of Britain. Carter's Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane were there. The largest, in the middle of the formation, I think is a bomber (like he was flying the night he was shot down). I believe the tiniest one (it only holds a pilot) would be his usual Spitfire. *AWESOME*. (/end squee)